Existing comment:
Travelers on the Public Works:
While providing immigrants and ordinary travelers access to the west, the boldness and vision of the Public Works caught the imaginations of engineers, authors, performers, and newspapermen as well. Politician and presidential candidate Henry Clay, Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, British author Charles Dickens, and missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman all journeyed on the Public Works, including the Allegheny Portage Railroad.
"America now numbers among its many wonderful artificial lines of communication, a mountain railrway, which, in boldness of design, and difficulty of execution, I can compare to no modern work I have ever seen..."
-- David Stevenson, British civil engineer, 1838
"I like traveling by the canal boats very much... [T]he placid moderate gliding ... at about four miles and a half an hour -- seemed to me infinitely preferable to the noise of wheels, the rumble of a coach, and the jerking of bad roads. The only nuisances are the bridges over the canal, which are so very low that one is obligated to prostrate himself on the deck of the boat to avoid being scraped off it. This humiliation occurs, upon an average, once every quarter of an hour."
-- Fanny Kemble, Actress, 1838
"Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice; and looking from the carriage window, the traveler gazes sheer down, without a stone or scarp of fence between, into the mountain depths below."
-- Charles Dickens, Author, 1842
Sleeping quarters for women and children on canal boats were separated from the men by a curtain. Harriet Beecher Stowe, later the author Uncle Tom;'s Cabin, traveled the Main Line Canal in 1841. Stowe wrote of the disappointment some travelers felt upon first glancing a canal boat. In her writing she captured the confusion and sleepishness in a ladies' cabin overcrowded with women, children, luggage, and one busy chambermaid.
"Amusing is the look of dismay which each newcomer gives to the confined [ladies] quarters that present themselves. Those who were so ignorant of the power of compression as to suppose the boat scarce long enough to contain them and theirs, find, with dismay, a respectabie colony of old ladies, babies, mothers, big baskets, and carpet bags already established. 'Mercy on us!' says one, after surveying the little room, about ten feet long and six high, 'Where are we all to sleep to-night?' " |